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Flare

Flare for Mac from Iconfactory is available from the Mac App Store for £5.99 and there is a 15-day free trial. It’s a photo-editor that comes with lots of features and built-in effects. Features available include:

Colour effects:

Exposure

Midtone brightness

Saturation, Brightness, Contrast

Tint

Duotone

Color filter

Color gradient

Black & white

Cross-processing

Editing an effect in Flare

Lens effects:

Gaussian blur

Motion blur

Zoom blur

Sharpen

Glow

Vignette

Creative effects:

Grain

Texture

Lightleak

Frame

Border

Rounded edges

Barrel distortion

Rotation

Scaling

Halftone

Pixellate

Scanlines

I have been using the trial for a few days now and on the whole the software has a lt going for it.

Negatives so far:

Slow – I am using a MacBook Pro 2.26 GHz with 4GB 1067 DDR3 RAM so I expected it to be quicker when applying effects (using clear all effects option)

Screen refresh – I don’t like how the whole screen refreshes when you switch between the different modes

Also, the undo doesn’t seem to work (for presets) and its only accessible from the menu rather than an on-screen button (like in edit mode using

No levels editing or curves

Positives:

Simple interface – even novices shouldn’t get lost!

Nice set of presets with extra ones downloadable from the vendor’s site

Ability to layer effects

Snapshots feature – save at any point to create a snapshot that can be (re)applied later to the same or other images

Ability to export to Flickr, your Mac or in an email

Availability of textures which can be edited

So on the whole its an interesting piece of software and if you don’t have a basic photo-editor then I can recommend it. Hopefully the developers will sort out the minor bugs and improve the interface in those areas where its lacking somewhat.